Thank you for subscribing!
Got it! Thank you!

Sneak Peek of the New World Trade Center's Observation Deck

The final tourist amenity at the new World Trade Center site, which some visitors still call Ground Zero, has announced what it'll offer tourists when it opens in the spring.

The observation deck, called One World (which would have been a better name for the whole building, come to think of it), will be on the 100th, 101st, and 102nd floors. The main views will be on the 102nd, where floor-to-ceiling windows look down 1,250 feet at the rest of Manhattan. (The original World Trade Center's top observation deck was on the 107th floor at a height of 1,377 feet.)

While the original decks had both indoor and outdoor components and took up entire floors, One World will only offer views from indoors, and due to the skyscraper's core design, only the perimeter of the structure will be available as floorspace—the center of the building contains the elevator shafts and other systems.

The tour will begin down at street level, where visitors will be allowed to walk along the bedrock that provides the building's foundation before being whisked to the top levels in one of five elevator cars that takes 60 seconds for the journey. The 100th floor will feature a 14-foot-wide disk called Sky Portal that will enable visitors to peer directly down to the faraway ground—in live HD; it doesn't jut out from the side of the building.

There will also be a fancy restaurant with a bar, a mid-level one, and a place to grab food quickly, but not all of them have large seating areas.

Tickets will also be sky-high: $32 for adults (and in the new WTC, you're an adult when you hit 13), and $26 for kids 6 to 12. 

You can't book tickets quite yet, but when you can, they will be at www.oneworldobservatory.com.

See the decks without tourists for the one and only time by watching this idealized rendering of what'll be there:

advertisement